penina
I'm sure my story is similar to everyone else's on this site. A looong history of struggling with my weight, trying many different kinds of diets, being successful at losing at least some of the excess weight, but then inevitably putting it back on again and then some. And slowly, over the years, my weight has just steadily gotten higher and higher. I can handle restricted eating for only so long, and then I just seem to run out of motivation. I get so easily discouraged if I don't see dramatic results after just a few weeks. And then discouragement leads to relapsing on my diet, which leads to guilt, which leads to feeling like I'll never be able to change, and I'm doomed to be fat forever, which leads to feelings of unworthiness, which leads to more eating to comfort myself, and so the viscious cycle goes...
I'd long resisted the idea of weight loss surgery. I'd heard some horror stories about the risks and complications of the gastric bypass operation, and I did not want to go there. I didn't want to have my insides rearranged. Besides, I'd felt that "instant" weight loss through surgery was cheating. It was taking the easy way out, and not doing the real work of learning how to eat healthily and exercise regularly. I saw it as giving up control over my body to the medical establishment and saying, essentially, "fix me". And I felt that I was the one who was supposed to be fixing my own problem and not handing it over to someone else.
But the trouble was, I wasn't having any success at fixing my problem. I tried soooo many times to diet, that it felt demoralizing to even think of trying all over again. And meanwhile, the complications of long-term obesity began to catch up with me. First it was the sleep apnea, then the osteoarthritis in my knees. I work in a job that requires some physical duties that were becoming more and more difficult for me to handle. I was getting cortisone shots into my knees every few months to help me get around without pain and stiffness, but as time went on, the shots seemed to last less and less time as my knees got worse and worse. I was told repeatedly that I would eventually need to have knee replacement surgery, and that losing weight would help me. I knew I had to lose weight to take some of the pressure off my knees, and also to qualify to have the knee replacements, as I'd heard that the surgery would not be very effective on someone as heavy as me. I didn't want to end up disabled.
At my last visit to the doctor who does my cortisone injections, we talked about my situation and I told her how I'd been struggling to try to lose weight. She said that if everything I've been trying up till now hasn't worked, then maybe it's time to try something else. My knees are in really bad shape, and the sooner I can get knee replacement surgery, the better. She reminded me that weight loss surgery is covered through my health plan, which I knew, but I still wasn't ready to seriously consider it.
I struggled for several more weeks, trying to eat healthy and get regular exercise, but was still having a hard time of it, and not making much progress with losing weight. I'd heard some positive things about the lap band surgery, so one day I decided to look up some information about it online. That was where I found this site, (among others), and I began reading all about the gastric banding procedure. I was impressed that it was less invasive than gastric bypass, less risky, there was less recovery time involved, and the band allowed for adjustments. The more I read about it, the more it sounded do-able for me. After thinking about it seriously for a couple of days, I emailed my primary physician and requested a referral for weight loss surgery.
